World watches as Bradley Manning finally faces trial

Washington: Hailed as a courageous whistleblower and reviled as a common traitor Bradley Manning, the young US soldier who provided WikiLeaks with over 250,000 pages of secret US documents, finally faces a military court on Monday in the United States.

Manning has already pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 charges regarding information he passed on to WikiLeaks, and faces up to 20 years in prison, but he has denied the more serious charges under the Espionage Act for which he could be imprisoned for life. The prosecution has said it would not pursue the death penalty.

Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, will be closely watching from his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he is avoiding arrest by British police seeking to effect his extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual misconduct allegations. Assange's lawyers say that from Sweden he faces the risk of being passed on to American authorities to face conspiracy charges relating to Manning's leak.

In America, freedom of speech campaigners, including Daniel Ellsberg, the man who in 1971 leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers, have backed Manning as a victim of government overreach.

The Australian Embassy is also keenly interested in the trial and its potential impact on Assange, which, should he ever face prosecution, has the potential to complicate the relationship between the two allies.

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Last month Fairfax Media reported a senior Australian Embassy officer had attended pre-trial hearings at Fort Meade — not far from the embassy in Washington, DC — and made detailed reports to Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs.

Despite Assange's fears, the Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, has said he does not believe Assange is the target of a US extradition effort. "Julian Assange could have been the subject of extradition action by the United States any time in the last two years, when he's been residing in the UK. He wasn't. To suggest that the Swedes are after him, as a CIA conspiracy, to get him to Stockholm and allowing him to be bundled off to Langley, Virginia, is sheer fantasy," Senator Carr has told the ABC.

Asked by the online organisation Democracy Now for a response to this on Wednesday, Assange declared, "Bob Carr is a well-known liar in Australian politics. The man's ignorance is only eclipsed by his arrogance."

He said by its own admission, the US Department of Justice still has an active investigation of "unprecedented scale and nature" into the leaks. The DOJ has not yet returned calls from Fairfax Media.

In the case against Manning the prosecution is arguing that because he leaked material to WikiLeaks, and because he would have known that al-Qaeda could have read them once published, he in effect communicated with the enemy. This assertion has become crucial to the case.

In a New York Times opinion piece two of America's best known champions of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler, wrote that should this assertion be accepted no media outlet could safely publish leaked material.

The extreme charges remaining in this case create a severe threat to future whistleblowers.

"The extreme charges remaining in this case create a severe threat to future whistle-blowers ... We cannot allow our concerns about terrorism to turn us into a country where communicating with the press can be prosecuted as a capital offense," they wrote.

Similarly the Los Angeles Times wrote in an editorial that the government's claims were "ominously broad".

"By the government's logic, The New York Times could be accused of aiding the enemy if bin Laden possessed a copy of the newspaper that included the WikiLeaks material it published."

On the other hand Walter Pincus — a Polk, Emmy, and Pulitzer prize winner — has argued that those who leak sensitive information that does not reveal government misdeeds but nonetheless harms it are not whistleblowing, but simply breaking the law.

In a pre-trial statement Manning said he leaked the information — particularly the "collateral murder video" that showed reporters and civilians being gunned down by an attack helicopter's cannon — in the public interest.

"The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have," Manning said. "They dehumanised the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote 'dead bastards' unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers."

He said the military incident reports he leaked "represented the on-the-ground reality of both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides," Manning said. "I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year."

Of the cache of over 250,000 US State Department cables, Manning said: "The more I read, the more I was fascinated by the way that we dealt with other nations and organisations. I also began to think that the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world."

The trial is expected to last over two months and will be presided over by Colonel Denise Lind, the chief judge of the Army's 1st Judicial Circuit. Manning has elected to forgo a jury, which would have been made up of either officers or a mixture of officers and enlisted men at his request. Rules of evidence and the burden of proof in a military trial are similar to those in the civilian system.

Manning's decision not to have his case heard by a jury has lead to speculation his lawyers believe a military jury would not be sympathetic to a man many regard as a traitor. Even PJ Crowley, the State Department spokesman who was forced to resign for criticising the military's allegedly harsh treatment of Manning in custody has said, "A private first class does not get to decide whether a conversation between a high-level US official and the king of a Gulf nation should be made public.”

The prosecution is expected call on a member of Seal Team Six, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as a witness to testify that he seized digitised WikiLeaks documents during the raid, as evidence that al-Qaeda did benefit from the leaks.

One expert in US military justice, Major General John Altenburg, said simply proving that America's enemies had accessed the information he leaked would not be enough to secure a conviction on the espionage charges, the prosecution would also have to prove that he had reason to believe the disclosure could cause harm to the US.

"Intent is difficult to prove," he said. "The jury and judge must draw inferences from the evidence."

The trial commences in the US at a time when President Barack Obama is facing criticism for his administration's secretiveness and heavy-handedness in hunting down leaks and their sources. Earlier this month it was revealed the Department of Justice had secretly obtained the phone records of up to 100 Associated Press reporters in one leak investigation, and labelled a well regarded DC-based Fox News reporter as a potential espionage co-conspirator in another.

In a recent speech Obama addressed the issue, saying he was "troubled" by the investigations.

"Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs," he said. "Our focus must be on those who break the law."

But he added that unless there were consequences for revealing secrets, there was little point in holding them at all.